


To Be Known by You

by ecrivant



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Desire, F/M, M/M, Melancholy, Other, Purgatory, Slice of Life, Summer Vacation, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28398048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecrivant/pseuds/ecrivant
Summary: It had been the strangest summer of recent memory: the days were lingering and dilatory, and rife with inexplicable phenomena.  When Reiner meets a stranger he feels he recognizes, someone as ethereal and bizarre as the summer atmosphere itself, he cannot resist the beguiling nature of this newfound acquaintance and accompanies them for a night.
Relationships: Reiner Braun/Reader, Reiner Braun/You
Comments: 4
Kudos: 36





	To Be Known by You

It had been the strangest summer of recent memory. The days were lingering and dilatory and often seemed swathed in some turbid and ethereal atmosphere, augmented by an interminable humidity which each day lasted far past dusk. The sun would hang in the sky for longer than its allotted time, and at duskfall, all terrene happenings stilled and gave way to strange, supernal movements to which no living being bore witness. The beach house tenanted by the Brauns, which sat in the very center of this surreal environment and was not much more than a well-maintained shanty abutting the shore—the transition from sparse greenery to sand occurring directly beneath its raised foundation—was too pervaded by this sense of uncanny. The inside seemed impossibly large for the dimensions of its edifice, and doors within moved on their own, and one could easily lose himself, sitting in one place, for hours at a time, staring at the irregularities in the wood wall panels or the microcosmic topography of the popcorn ceilings or the addled patterns in the stained, grey carpets. Reiner liked to taunt Gabi and tell her the house was haunted, but it was something neither was completely disinclined to believe.

It had been the morning of third day that his mother mentioned the storage shed for the first and last time. Reiner, awake since sunrise on account of his prolonged restlessness, and Gabi, wanting to be with him, sat at the kitchen table, Reiner’s unfocused gaze resting on the view outside the window and Gabi’s on a spoon she mindlessly fingered. His mother’s words had drawn his eyes towards her—her stare, intense, eyes narrowed in questioning:

“Were you doing something in the storage shed last night?” 

He shook his head ‘no’ and watched her interrogation move from him to Gabi.

“Gabi?”

“Mm?” Eyes not acknowledging her.

“Were you?”

“Was I what?”

“Doing something in the shed? The storage shed. Last night.”

“No.” Gabi finally looked up, not at her aunt but at Reiner, eyes wide and brows raised. Body turning, she met her aunt’s gaze. “Should I have been?”

“It was open this morning,” his mother finally clarified, turning and reaching for a glass as she spoke. “The door was just cracked, but it was open.”

“Maybe someone didn’t shut it all the way.”

“Maybe.” 

Her response hung in the air, suspended by doubt, unconvinced of her son’s suggestion. She glanced out the window, towards the shed in question—its door long since closed and locked after her curious discovery that morning—and it seemed to stare back at her.

“It’s nothing.” Gabi’s remark interrupted her aunt’s staring contest with the building. Her tone was playfully dismissive. 

“I think you just want to find something to worry about, Aunt Karina.”

“Maybe.”

There was no more mention of the shed after that day, but Reiner, usually awake before the rest of the house, would, without fail, hear his mother exit the house, creep into the backyard, and shut and lock the shed door each morning in the dim-blue dawn light. 

Later that same week Reiner had convinced Gabi to camp in the backyard with him under the guise of fun activity, though he truly intended to observe the shed for the whole night. She had been excited at the prospect of staying awake into the morning and then promptly fell asleep before midnight, and for the rest of the time he simply sat, cross-legged and perspiring, under an ether rife with stars, eyes unwavering from that damn shed. 

Apparently having dozed off, though, as he awoke to the sound of the back door and his mother’s soft footfalls and opened his eyes to see her locking the shed. Like every morning, a cyclical action of the damned in hell. He accepted the phenomenon as an unknowable and moved on. 

—

Reiner could not remember how long they had been there; time moved differently in this place. He drove to explore and found that the main road stretched on forever, never bending or turning, and the area itself laid among an immutable scenery: an arrant wasteland of vacant beachfront housing, like some vast and spanning afterthought. Could you get lost on a road like this? A pavement belt, flanked by stark shrubbery and shallow gullies full of groundwater. Sometimes, the rare stretch of unsettled coastline with a view of the sea uninhibited by copy-pasted housing. There was something beautiful in the desolate and purgatorial landscape. 

The road ended at a bridge, one with caving beams and a skeletal substructure which barely supported its own weight. He never dared explore it, or God forbid drive over it, but he often sat in his car, pulled off to the side of the road, and stared at it. Captivated by the disrepair, what it represented—nothing better elucidated the mortality and impermanence of humanity than infrastructural decay. The view would eventually become too unsettling, as if it watched him as well, and he would reverse the car and turn around and drive back towards the house. When he would arrive, his mother would sometimes report he had been gone for hours, sometimes thirty minutes. 

—

“Why don’t you take Gabi to the farmers’ market today?”

He didn’t know there was a farmers’ market, much less even a place to host one. At his mother’s suggestion, though, he drove down that endless stretch of road with Gabi in tow, and miraculously came upon a densely populated park, filled with tents which did little to block the relentless heat. Gabi bounded towards the entrance, Reiner trailing behind, and they quickly ate through the two twenty-dollar bills unceremoniously handed to them before their departure that morning. Reiner was glad his mother hadn’t expected any money to be left. 

The park itself held towering trees with sparse canopies which casted amorphous shadows on the dirt paths. So unlike any area found at a coast. Walking along, enveloped in shade and shielded from the sun, one could almost be comfortable. The main walkway was wide, easily fitting five people across, and flanked by densely packed tents. Each with their own smiling vendor. They were nice, maybe a little too nice, and each offered a too-wide smile at Gabi as she made off with their too-good products. He was uneased by the whole affair. In retrospect, he couldn’t remember the last time he actually saw people in the area, and he assumed it was because it was so sparely populated. Yet, with the sheer wall of bodies milling around the park, he felt he had accidently wandered into a city, the market itself some kind of microcosmic metropolis. Strange to have never noticed the park while driving; it was never there until it was, as if it materialized out of nothing. 

He glanced around him, suddenly struck by Gabi’s absence. A warning call of her name, and at the lack of response, another, more frantic one. He spun around once, scanning the area, and continued to do so despite remarking how the crowd—a singular, ebbing mass of people—perfectly and wholly obscured her location. But she soon yelled his name and beckoned him over to a booth replete with floral bouquets and emitting an aroma so intense he had to pause before continuing into the miasma.

“Can we get some? For Aunt Karina?”

Her eyes pleaded with the potency of a mendicant’s— _nothing but a scoundrel_ , he thought, _who knows I cannot say no._ He reached into his wallet and searched for bills and found none. He sheepishly asked the vendor, who was obscured by the perennial heaps before them, if they accepted cards. A soft ‘yes’ spurred Gabi on to grab at a bouquet of yarrow and roses, a perfumed, white and yellow amalgam; a movement which revealed the vendor’s face. 

Reiner was struck immobile. You, once hidden, now revealed, were immediately alluring, aura imbued with such profound familiarity. As if you were already his lover. He stumbled through his transaction as you stared at him with eyes he felt he knew.

“Would you like to include a handwritten note?”

Gabi nodded furiously, as if possessed by some excitable demon. She dictated a note, childishly simple yet unequivocally kind, and you wrote it out on a notecard with a flourish. Wrapping the cluster of flowers in tissue paper and tulle and tucking the note in the center, ending the routine by handing it to Gabi. With a smile that was just right. She ran off again, and Reiner waited for a moment longer, as if he knew to wait to be handed that scribbled note which read, ‘Meet me at the bridge tonight.’ 

You felt so much like a memory. He could not shake the feeling he knew you, deeply and wholly. 

—

Such vague wording, as if designed to make one second guess himself. He would have to trust his instinct about the time. In the moment he felt as if he knew you, but your thought process was unfamiliar to him—had you been struck by the same overwhelming feeling of familiarity? Assumed he would understand what ‘tonight’ meant? Or was this some omniscience taunting him and his implicit trust of a stranger? 

He was at the bridge by sundown. Car idled. He waited. An hour, a minute. And suddenly you were there—he jumped when he saw you. You sat on the rotted and caving beams of the bridge, beckoning him with a gaze. He approached you and stood at the first interstice between road and bridge and after a pause, dumbly said:

“I think I know you.”

And you confirmed his sentiment with echoed words. He creeped onto the railing, supporting himself on rusted girders resembling steles erected to commemorate some bygone and lost epoch. The chapped wood on which he sat dug into his thighs, and when he looked down, his feet hung over a canyon which in the dark became some measureless void. Your sillage, floral and penetrative and everlasting. You seemed to fluoresce in the pitch.

“Have you ever been in love?”

Your timid venture—the question, just for him. He stared at you and thought for a moment and replied no, not that he could remember. You asked him if you could tell him of your first love, puerile and real. He nodded yes. And you began:

You spoke beautifully and openly about your childhood with a rawness, a candor, otherwise unshared between strangers. You spoke of how your memories were places and people, painted in golden hues. How your childhood room was always bright—in the morning, the rising sun would creep onto the bedroom wall and stay there as if resting in a lover’s embrace; and at sunset, the light would grow weary and slink away to make room for the night. How those walls saw many things: your great-grandfather’s paintings, your mother’s smiling face. And how it all smelled so distinct, even now, like old books and incense. How, as a child, you often felt like some unchanging cairn laid solely to watch the world move around you. 

And as you spoke about the young boy you had once loved, Reiner thought of the way this intellection you so tenderly painted sounded like him: a child, tall, with a mess of blonde hair and hazel eyes that held an unusual intensity; a child with a tender voice, high-pitched and soft, and a lopsided smile. And you repeated the words, “I can so clearly remember him,” like some unspoken truism. You had shared your favorite places with this boy; your first kiss, and your hopes and fears; and the pain of aging and coming to know the dark and black and crushing void associated with it.

You spoke of how the young boy suddenly died, without explanation. How the last time you saw him, there was such a pervasive sadness in his gaze. How you despised this was the way you remembered him—with mournful and darkened eyes. You had asked what was wrong, and he had not been sure. Instead, the two of you clasped hands and sat in silence for a last time. 

“I just remember the chaos.” A whisper, spoken more to yourself. 

“I remember waking up to blue lights on my ceiling. It was a cold blue light, a crude perversion of the warmness of the rising sun. I looked out the window, and cars were crowded under the flickering streetlamp below, and I heard the wailing through my window. I knew. I knew, but I just climbed in my bed and pulled the covers over my head, as if they would drown out the light and the shouts of a broken mother, and squeezed my eyes shut and saw his eyes and cowlicked hair and a toothy, lopsided grin.”

You asserted that part of you died with him. A pause.

“It felt odd to be in love with someone who was already dead.”

And then you were finished. You took a deep breath, as if the story had been spoken with one, single inhalation. Reiner blinked hard and processed the words and tried to think of something to say. ‘Sorry’ seemed so blithe.

“What was his name?”

You shrugged your shoulders.

“I can’t remember.”

He stared at you, incredulous, half-expecting you to be joking. How could one possibly—

“Sometimes I think he didn’t have one.”

Your whispered voice, as if about to shatter: “You remind me of him. That’s why you’re here.”

Effervescent words that dissolved in the air. Something nagging at the back of his mind. He wrapped you in an embrace and held you there, and he thought not of you as a stranger. A hand on your back and the other in your hair. Breathing your exhalations. An intimacy impossible between two unfamiliar people. He swore he knew you. 

He felt your lips on his neck, testing, inquisitive. He pulled back, meeting your gaze, eyes melancholic and wistful and searching for something intangible, possibly nonexistent. You had the eyes of someone who was never anything but lost, and despite your shared unfamiliarity, he hoped you would find something within him as he leaned to press his lips to yours. This kiss begot another and another, and his hand was on your cheek, and your skin was warm beneath his fingers, betraying your spectral nature. He thought he heard you whisper his name, though it was something you couldn’t have known.

He held you, again, with no desire to do more; this chaste intimacy was so much more potent. He savored your embrace and felt he could stay here, in your presence, with your touch, until he aged and crumbled like the disintegrating bridge on which they sat. A moment of abject redamancy. Time moved differently here, with you. 

He was then inexplicably struck with the feeling that he missed you, as if he had finally found that which he had gone years without.

You pulled away and stood. Without warning.

“Can I see you again?” His plea, desperate, closing.

“I’m not certain.”

And with that, you asked him to leave. He somehow knew he was meant to comply without question.

As he departed, and behind him the road and the bridge and you faded into blackness, he was reminded of the first time he moved homes—that unsettling and melancholic feeling of abandoning something familiar. He drove and drove and missed his street, and instead of turning around, he surrendered to the compulsion to keep driving, and he drove some more. He thought of you the entire time, oblivious his own existence. He then thought of himself, and when reflecting on his childhood, he could not remember it; he only saw himself in the presence of a young child who looked like you, a shared heart between you. He drove through the sunrise and another sunset, and he stopped to fill up his car with gas and kept driving. He wasn’t sure how, but he eventually found his way back to the beach.

He arrived at the house and quietly climbed into bed. He imagined you dissolving into the landscape; the canyon beneath the bridge widening like an open mouth and swallowing you. Purloined by the purgatory which begot you. 

He suddenly could not remember your face. 

A thought, lost, just as he heard his mother closing and locking the shed door outside.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! this piece is kind of weird and is more of a short story than a trad reader insert but... anyway...
> 
> thank you to everyone who has been reading/liking my stuff! it means the world to me, and I really love being able to write creatively for something i enjoy! part of me wants to make this a long-form piece, but i don’t think i have the patience or the talent to do so. maybe later down the line, we’ll see.
> 
> go hold someone you love, xoxo


End file.
